AFGHANISTAN TODAY – STRATEGIC AND SOCIAL ISSUES

The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and heartrending airport scenes of people trying to flee have brought back distressing images of women under previous Taliban rule. Will history repeat itself? I’ll talk briefly about women during the Taliban years, how they progressed in the past two decades, and where they stand now. But first, a very brief background about the country and its women.

The strategic location of Afghanistan on the trade and migration crossroads to Central Asia, led to historical political instability due to struggles for control by outside powers.

The culture was patriarchal and in the modern era, veered between oppression and reform. In 1919, King Amanullah, promoted women’s education, and discouraged the veil, polygamy, and child marriage. At the same time, religious Afghans opposed the reforms. The King was overthrown in 1929, and the ruling mullah closed girls’ schools and enforced veiling. In 1964, a new constitution under King Zahir Shah introduced women’s rights, universal suffrage, a parliament, and civil rights. Again, mullahs obstructed the reforms.

With the Soviet invasion, further liberal laws were introduced but religious factions objected, and after the Russians withdrew in 1989, the mujahideen restricted women by dint of sharia law.

The Taliban came to power in 1996 promising to stop warring mujahideen militias and restore peace and security. In three months, they easily took control of a third of Afghanistan’s provinces, as the warlords surrendered without a fight.

Before the Taliban, many schools were coeducational. Seventy percent of teachers, forty percent of doctors, and over half the university students were women. They became engineers, lawyers, and judges.

During the Taliban rule between 1996 to 2001, strict sharia laws were imposed in keeping with their concept of a “pure Islamic state”. According to the Taliban, the restrictions were for women’s own protection, and meant to safeguard their “honour”. Windows in homes were painted over so women couldn’t be seen from the street. If the Taliban’s vigilante police (the Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice) caught a woman not totally covered, or wearing shoes with clicking heels, she risked a beating, and her family could be punished as well. The penalty for uncovered ankles was public whipping, and for adultery or sex outside marriage, stoning to death.

Women who couldn’t afford a burka or had a disability which distorted the garment, were prisoners in their own homes and some died because they didn’t receive medical help. In any case, hospitals for women were inadequate, with dirty maternity wards, little equipment, and insufficient clean water. Men were usually forbidden to treat women, and only a few select female doctors and nurses were allowed to work in hospitals.

Girls were generally barred from school after the age of eight. Any education or training for women took place in underground schools, like the Golden Needle Sewing School, ostensibly a sewing circle, still acceptable to the Taliban, or “reciting houses” where bereaved women came to mourn their dead. Teachers at these schools risked assassination if caught.

Why is the Taliban opposed to female education?

According to their ideology of radical Islam, it spreads vulgarity and is against their teachings, which are God-given, not man made. Women’s reform was potentially dangerous, too. Affecting half the population, it could shake the patriarchal and theological ideology of their misogynist Islamic Emirate and medieval utopia. I should add that the Taliban’s view of women’s education contrasts with many traditional Islamic teachings that do value female education.

Women were allowed to work in the poppy fields but usually banned from employment outside the home. This restriction forced thousands of widows who had lost husbands in the many armed civil conflicts to become beggars and sell their possessions to avoid family starvation.

Punishments for anyone included execution for converting to another religion. As an authoritarian state, the people had no freedom of speech, assembly, or association. There were also bans on music, the internet, movies and television.

What did Afghan women gain in the past 20 years during the occupation of US and allied forces?

In the post-Taliban 2004 constitution, an equal rights clause specified that twenty-five per cent of the seats in the Afghan version of the House of Representatives should be filled by women, and seventeen percent in the Senate. However, Article 3 stated, “No law shall contravene the tenets and provisions of the holy religion of Islam” – clearly open to interpretation – even perhaps, a Taliban version. Yet there were very brave women. When Malalai Joya, a young female parliamentarian protested some members were misogynists, drug traffickers, war criminals, and human rights abusers, there was an uproar and UN security forces were called to protect her. Following that incident and more of her critical comments, she was on the run to avoid death.

Despite the ruined economy, shattered institutions, and decades of insecurity due to civil conflict, women were able to reengage with society. They were hugely assisted by the new regime’s construction of more than 3,000 health facilities. Most people now had reasonable access to medical care. However, growing battles between the Taliban and government, as well as lawlessness on roads due to sexual harassment and robbery, made travel increasingly perilous around the 18,000 rural villages where more than seventy percent of Afghan women live.

By 2017, the number of girls in primary school and secondary education had grown by more than a third, and 100,000 were university students. Women’s life expectancy went up from 56 to 66 years and mortality during childbirth dropped by more than a third. In 2020, twenty-seven per cent of Afghan members of parliament were women, as were more than twenty per cent of civil servants. Women became established as judges (there were 270), and they were prominent in the media, music industry, and sports. But the price was high. Female police officers were gunned down. Taliban insurgents burned down schools and forced hundreds to close because girls attended. They killed teachers and students, and disfigured schoolgirls’ faces with acid. The continuing insurgency led to a brain drain of well-educated women essential to the country’s nation building.

Taliban aside, Afghan society itself is predominantly male-controlled. Forced and underage marriage was still widespread in the past 20 years. Most women have experienced domestic violence, and some are imprisoned for “moral crimes” such as “running away” from home to escape violence or forced marriage. Women who are raped can be pressured to marry their rapists. In rural provinces, the Taliban, tribal courts or mobs mete out summary justice to women accused of sex outside marriage, as such transgressions dishonour the family. The list of moral offenses that merit such honour killings have come to include working in the media, social activism and baad, the tradition of handing over virgin daughters to settle disputes of debts or crime. If the girls refuse to comply, they could be murdered to redeem their family’s honour. The woman reformer, Wazhma Frogh lamented that girls are not only surrendered to settle family disputes, but even exchanged for a fighting dog. Such customs continued despite the 2009 Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women that banned abuses such as rape, underage and forced marriage, domestic violence, and forced prostitution.

Another reformer, Massouda Jalal, explained that Afghanistan’s society is predicated on “honor and shame”, rather than “right and wrong”, so “the shameful consequence is more important than the wrong act that caused it”. This mindset, in addition to lack of education, the influence of religious extremists, and absence of judicial will in remote areas, made the laws of 2009 unenforceable.

Where do women stand now?

Since taking power, Taliban leaders pledged amnesties for government employees, education for girls, and women in government pursuant to Islamic law. But for the past twenty years, they continued to attack and suppress women. Since January this year, fourteen women were killed, including three administering polio vaccinations, a police officer, and two judges.

Recently, the Taliban reportedly killed a woman for travelling alone. They shot another because her head wasn’t covered, on the very day the leaders vowed to honour women’s rights. In other reports, women were told not to leave the house without male kin as escorts, and female students at Kabul University warned not to leave their dorms without male guardians. Taliban fighters were allegedly searching for employees of the government and NGOs, and were banning female journalists from working.

As they blitzed through the rural districts, the Taliban demanded lists of eligible girls and widows from local mullahs, and ordered families to surrender women and girls for marriage to their fighters. When some men in the Bamiyan province resisted, they were beaten. Villagers were forced to open clothes cupboards so the Taliban could assess the ages of females who lived there. According to their interpretation of Islamic sharia, women are chattels to be claimed as spoils of war.

Internal security could deteriorate further if al-Qaeda and Islamic State increase their operations in Afghanistan, and the vacuum left by the allied withdrawal leads to further turmoil through strategic and economic exploitation by Pakistan, China, Iran, and Turkey. This scenario bodes ill for Afghan women and children, already the main victims of violence and displacement in long-term internecine conflicts.

Can the Taliban be trusted to keep their word?

It seems unlikely. They have continually attacked girls’ education during the past two decades and killed women since taking power. Nor have they renounced their radical, anti-women ideology.

What is the future for Afghan women?

From recent reports on the ground, Kabul is virtually a male city with few women on the streets. But there might be reason for hope. The people have tasted freedom. It is not the same country as it was in 1996. Young people are used to the internet, freedom of speech, and could form part of a pushback.  But they need help from the international community to hold the Taliban accountable for their word regarding inclusive government, amnesties, and women’s rights, or else forfeit foreign aid and legitimacy. Otherwise, Afghan women may face a default theocracy and a dysfunctional, terror state.